Please join us for a service of remembrance and to honor local Holocaust survivors and their families, led by clergy and members of the Jewish community of greater Madison. Following the service, there will be a special program on "Why? Explaining the Holocaust" with Peter Hayes, Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University. See more below about the program and speaker.

We hope you will be able to join us in person for this meaningful community commemoration. The event will be livestreamed for those unable to attend in person. During registration, you can submit names of the people you want to memorialize to be read at the service by Rabbi Prosnit and submit questions for the speaker to incorporate into his talk. Additional names will be memorialized, and questions for the speaker will be asked in person at the event.

Program:
Based on his bestselling book, Why? Explaining the Holocaust, Prof. Hayes’s talk will address three questions that continue to challenge people seeking to understand what happened: Why were Jews the principal target of Nazi hatred? Why did that hatred escalate to murder? and Why didn’t any person or organization stop the escalation or the carnage?

Speaker: Peter Hayes
Peter Hayes, who holds degrees from Bowdoin, Oxford, and Yale, is the Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University; the author or editor of fourteen books on the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust; and a former chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

More details and registration are coming soon.

The Annual Community Yom HaShoah Sevice and Program is sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Madison and is funded by the Mitchell and Sharon Rapkin Endowment for Holocaust Education and Commemoration.

Community Survey:
Those Impacted By The Holocaust If you are a Holocaust survivor, refugee, escaped from the Nazis, or a family member - please let us know, so we may personally invite you to our Community Yom HaShoah Service and Program. If you are interested, we'd also like to invite you to participate in our service, either by reading a passage or lighting a candle. If you have not signed up in the past or your contact information has changed, please fill out our interest form >